Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

9.04.2016

Amour fou

Pictured:
Peter Coyote’s fingers and Emmanuelle Seigner’s lips in Bitter Moon (1994), one of Roman Polanski’s most batshit-insane and
underrated films. At the outset it feels
like an early-’90s erotic thriller in the vein of Basic Instinct; by the third act it has revealed itself to be a
jet-black comedy of which Buñuel would likely have approved. That is to say it’s a comedy about the
madness and the excess of sexual desire, and about sadism and masochism as a
perpetual loop (represented visually by the repeated image of Coyote and
Seigner riding a carousel together).
Everything about the film is too much, from the sickly melodramatic
score by Vangelis to the purple dialogue—and yet it is all completely absorbing
in the most shameless way. Like the
film’s square-but-curious audience surrogate figure (played by Hugh Grant), we
can’t quite believe what we’re hearing and seeing and yet we’re so riveted we
can’t turn away.

Peter
Coyote (who chews the scenery with relish, and rightly so; he’ll never get a role this good
again) plays a character who would not be out of place in an 18th-century
Gothic novel, or a pornographic one. He’s
a seducer: mysterious, grotesque, and flamboyantly rhetorical. Both literally and symbolically castrated
(he’s a paraplegic), he has learned to use his tongue to attract and control
everyone within range. The story of his
love affair with the endlessly mutable Mimi (Seigner), recounted for the Hugh
Grant character over a series of nights, is as digressive and baroque as a tale
by Scheherazade and as perverse as one by the Marquis de Sade. While I haven’t seen Polanski’s last film, Venus in Fur, it would seem to make an
ideal double bill with this one, in part because it also stars Seigner; throw
in Cul-de-Sac and you have an entire evening’s
worth of kinky farce. I loved discovering
Bitter Moon because it reminded me
that Polanski is fundamentally a comic filmmaker, an absurdist for whom the
battle of the sexes is a dance—violent, beautiful, ridiculous.